The Washington Post made a massive correction on Monday to a January story about a phone call between then President Donald Trump and a Georgia election investigator, while the liberal newspaper admitted that several quotes attributed to Trump based on an anonymous source were inaccurate.
The corrected story was a hot topic in cable news and talk shows that helped spread the Post’s flawed report, and media watchers think it points to bigger problems with anonymous agenda-oriented sources and liberal channels that rush to “confirm” them “.
“This ‘fix’ is more than a fix, it questions the widespread dependence of the liberal media on anonymous sources to attack and undermine Republicans,” Cornell Law School professor and media critic William A. Jacobson told Fox News.
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“Almost all of Russia’s collusion media effort was based on anonymous sources that turned out to be exaggerated at best, and false at worst, after the Mueller Report was released,” continued Jacobson. “This raises the question of whether these sources exist or are fed with the answers that the liberal media wants to create the appearance of reporting for what is in reality a regurgitation of the media’s talking points.”
Hill’s media columnist and Fox News contributor Joe Concha believes that anonymous sources exist, but they are usually simply political agents who seek to spread their favorite narrative, regardless of the facts.
“They get these invoked quotes and they come from a nefarious source. Does this all sound familiar? And it is not Deep Throat that we are talking about here, it is a political agent who had an agenda,” said Concha on Tuesday. in “Fox & Friends”.
“It’s more or less like this, you go to the beach and throw food for the gulls and the gull doesn’t check exactly what the food is, they just eat it. They eat it and that’s what happens with the media, often,” said Concha. “During the Trump era, we had all these nameless sources that seem to go in only one direction, negatively towards the 45th president.”
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The Post initially reported that Trump told an official who worked in the office of Georgia’s Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, to “find fraud” in the state, that he narrowly lost to Joe Biden, and that she would be a “national hero. “if you did.
However, a recent recording of the December 23 call found that he did not use those words. Instead, Trump said he would be “praised” when the “right answer was made public” and encouraged her to take a closer look at the mail boxes in Fulton County, which is heavily blue.
Concha added that the original story usually gets significantly more coverage than the correction. Grabien Media founder Tom Elliott set up a montage of media outlets promoting the Post’s now unmasked “find the scam” rumor.
CNN even boasted on the air that its own reporter “confirmed” the false details of the call.
“Will any of these ‘reporters’ offer corrections? If not, are they ‘reporters’ or activists? Yes, these questions are rhetorical,” Elliott wrote.
Washington Examiner columnist Becket Adams wrote that the “real scandal” is that many news organizations claim to confirm the false story with their own anonymous sources. CNN was not the only one to confirm the corrected Post bomb since then, as Vox, NBC News, ABC News and USA Today were among the other mainstream vehicles to do so.
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“It is unrealistic for so many sources to be wrong about the same thing. The competing media are more likely to talk to the same individual or anonymous individuals, which leads to uncomfortable questions about whether the media was merely fed with bad or intentional information. manipulated “wrote. “How does one ‘confirm’ something that is not true?”
Lois Boynton, a professor at the University of North Carolina and a media ethics guru, feels that the media that used the Post’s “find the fraud” information to deal with the faux pas.
“For the sake of transparency and credibility, it would be up to them to acknowledge their mistake, issue a correction and revisit their procedures for verifying the information. Although it is one of several statements attributed to Mr. Trump, quoting or misinterpreting a statement can affect credibility other assignments, “Boynton told Fox News. “This kind of problem has a ripple effect on the reputation of all media. It is difficult to get confidence today.”
DePauw University professor and media critic Jeffrey McCall feels that the Post’s correction “is the kind of media neglect that makes many citizens suspicious of the media” in general.
“The story should never have run in its original form because it was apparently based only on ‘one source’. Anonymous sources have a place in journalism, but the reporting organization was sure that this “source” is really reliable. The Post was very anxious to detonate this bomb because it fit into a general narrative that it wanted to disclose about Trump and the fallout election, “McCall told Fox News.
McCall thinks the Post should consider revealing the identity of the source who provided inaccurate information.
“I understand that the media need to protect sources occasionally, but that protection should be for sources that disclose accurate information. This source has essentially lost its right of protection by providing inaccurate information. The public deserves to know who the Post was trusting, when it shouldn’t have been, “said McCall.
Media Research Center executive editor Tim Graham echoed McCall’s thoughts.
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“This fraudulent story exposes what’s wrong with anonymous sources. They can claim the most hyperbolic things about what a president said and when an audio recording exposes fraud, no one knows the identity of who falsified the news. At the very least, we must know who this is, so that other reporters can know that they should not use them again, “Graham told Fox News.
“It shows how desperate the Post and other media that hated Trump were, that they were so credulous for disinformation, even when they claimed they were the antidote to disinformation,” added Graham. “If these media outlets care about the facts and the truth, they will investigate how it happened and let us know how they went wrong. We will not hold our breath.”
David Rutz of Fox News contributed to this report.